Quick Pic, Uncategorized, What's In The Lab

Quick Pic: Camels for Christmas

December 23, 2025 Henry Hebert Leave a comment

We are all looking forward to a little break over the holidays, but wanted to share a book that has captured everyone’s attention in the lab this week: Edward Topsell’s History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents from 1658. Originally published in two volumes in 1607 and 1608 (Beasts and Serpents, respectively), this is the first collected edition. It describes both real and fantastic animals, including delightful woodcut illustrations, like the camels below.

wooduct illustration of Edward Topsell's dromedary — The dromedary camel

wooduct illustration of Edward Topsell's bactrian camel — The Bactrian camel

This copy has been digitized by the Internet Archive, so you can see and read about all of the other animals here: https://archive.org/details/historyoffourfoo00tops

Thanks for reading in 2025. Have a safe and happy holiday. We’ll see you in the new year!

Quick Pic, What We Find In Books

Quick Pic: Modesty Flaps, Continued

December 10, 2025 Henry Hebert Leave a comment

This week we found another example of modesty flaps added by a reader or previous owner. This time on a paperback copy of The selected poems of Frank O’Hara. They’ve also added a laminate book cover over the bandage to seal it in place.

We do not recommend using bandaids on library materials. You can already see how poorly the adhesive is aging as it migrates from edges and holes in the bandage. Please choose high quality, chemically stable materials and adhesives for your modestly flaps.

Uncategorized, What's In The Lab

Modesty Flaps

November 26, 2025 Henry Hebert Leave a comment

Rubenstein Library’s History of Medicine collection holds a sizable collection of anatomical flap books, which are books with illustrations featuring layers of movable paper flaps that can be lifted to reveal the layers of organs and tissues below. You can see several examples from a 2011 library exhibition here. We often get these books in the lab to correct common problems that can occur with the many layers of paper flaps: typically misfolds, tears, or detached flaps. This early 18th century work by Christoph von Hellwig, commonly known as Anatomicum vivum, came to us recently for some of those problems. During examination, something seemed a little off with the plates at the back.

Judging from the bright white wove paper and print type of the additions, it appears that in the recent past someone had glued in some modesty flaps to cover the anatomical figures. Duke acquired this volume in 2016.

The modesty flaps are supposed to look like a draped piece of cloth – but to me they just look like a cabbage leaf. So at first I thought someone was doing their own cheeky version of the “Fig Leaf Campaign“, a movement to censor classical sculpture that was carried out in the 16th century following the Council of Trent. Looking at images of other copies of the same edition, however, I have found some examples with more contemporary looking modesty flaps and some without any kind of covering flap. So now it is unclear to me how it was originally issued. Further research required.

If you are curious about the different layers in these prints, the Marion J. Siegman Archives at Thomas Jefferson University made some really great videos of a 1744 edition of this same work to demonstrate how the flaps operate. You can watch them here.

What We Find In Books

Quick Pic: Best Apology Note Ever

November 7, 2025 Beth Doyle Leave a comment

Cat with lettuce on head note card

This book recently came down from Circulation. It was out on interlibrary loan, and came back with a cut front cover. The apology note, in the shape of a cat head with a head of lettuce, is now our favorite thing we have found in a book outside of the famous banana.

We appreciate our colleague’s very apologetic, and very funny note. Our new student assistant just learned how to mend paper tears. This will be one of the first books that she repairs with that new skill set.

Adopt-a-Book, Quick Pic, Uncategorized, What's In The Lab

What’s In the Lab: Le voyage de l’Isabella

October 8, 2025 Henry Hebert

This 20th century French work of science fiction is back in the lab for evaluation for one of our imaging workflows. Published roughly 60 years after Verne’s Voyage au centre de la Terre, Creux’s novel features a ship that can drill its way into the earth – rather than the protagonists climbing down a lava tube. We just love the highly decorated cover.

The custom housing for this item was funded through our Adopt-A-Book program. Other adopted conservation treatments are currently on display in the Mary Duke Biddle room in an exhibit titled Donors Choose: Highlights from the Duke Libraries Adopt-a-Book Program. Please join us on Tuesday, October 14, 2025, from 11am to 12pm, for a gallery talk. Staff from the Conservation Services Department will be available to talk about the items on display and answer questions. We will have bookmarks and buttons for attendees!

Exhibits, What's In The Lab

Watermarks Tell Tales

July 11, 2025 Henry Hebert

This scribal copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence will soon travel for exhibition at the Museum of the American Revolution. A declaration of independence by the army of black Haitians from French colonial rule made 1804, the original document strongly echoes the rhetoric of the American Revolution three decades earlier. It established the first black republic in the world.

The front page of the scribal copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence. — High quality images of each page are available in the Duke Digital Repository: https://repository.duke.edu/dc/haitideclaration/hdims01001

Duke’s copy of the Declaration was found in the papers of Jean Baptiste Pierre Aime Colheux de Longpré, a French colonizer of Saint-Domingue (Haiti) who fled the country during its revolution and settled in New Orleans around 1812. The manuscript was very likely made shortly after the Declaration took effect. Few known contemporary manuscript copies are available to scholars, residing at the British Library, the French National Archives, and the National Library of Jamaica. For more background on the history and scholarship of this important document, see Julia Gaffield’s 2014 article in The Appendix.

Before any item from the collection is loaned to another institution, it undergoes thorough examination and documentation. This manuscript is written on light blue laid paper, which is traditionally manufactured by hand using a woven wire mould. Wire moulds often include a watermark from the paper mill, made by sewing wire into a design through the mould. Leonie Müller, from Harvard Museums, has written a good explainer of the process with images. Watermarks in paper can give a lot of information about the place and date of its manufacture.

Since the wires from the paper mould leave the paper slightly thinner above them during the paper making process, transmitted light can be used to clearly see the laid and chain lines, as well as any watermarks. I place the manuscript on a light table and was able to clearly see watermarks on the left and right side of the sheet. On the left side of the sheet, the words “AL MASSO” are visible. This is referring to the Al Masso paper mill, which was formed in 1782 in the city of Pescia, Italy.

On the right side of the sheet, you can see a crown-topped shield crest, featuring a bird and stone tower. The words “GIORo MAGNANI” are visible beneath it, referring to Giorgio Magnani. Magnani formed the Al Masso mill in partnership with Antonio Arrigoni. The Bernstein Consortium has some photos of the same watermark here that better show some of the details.

Pescia became known in Tuscany for papermaking as early as the thirteenth century. Due to an abundance of running water in the area, the city hosted hundreds of paper mills and by the nineteenth century became an important site of industrialization in the region. The Magnani family has been producing paper since the fifteenth century and continues to do so today.

By closely examining items in the library collection, we can start to piece together more information about their origin and manufacture from seemingly small details.

Quick Pic

New tables, less back ache!

July 3, 2025 Beth Doyle

We love getting new equipment for our work areas. In the past month, we have upgraded to sit-stand tables for two shared work areas. We are thrilled to present our new “Conservation Station” at Smith Warehouse. This space allows our shelf preparation work to be co-located with acquisitions and cataloging. By moving these workflows to Smith, we anticipate a quicker turnaround from shelf-prep to shelf. This table was a hand-me-down from another department, and we are thrilled to have it.

Conservation Station and our new-to-us table!

Over in the conservation lab we have upgraded from an older desk-height table to an Uplift sit-to-stand table. This table is in the “dirty room” where we do all of our solvent and mold removal work. The desk is chair-height and difficult to work on for any length of time.

Our older fixed-height desk gave everyone a back ache.

Our new table has a lot of “bells and whistles” the old table does not. It can adjust from 25″ to 51″ in height, it has locking wheels, and a solid top. We can move this table into the lab when we need added table space, something that was impossible with the old table.

The new sit-stand table with a free gift!

We really like the Uplift brand desk. The best part is the desks come with the choice of free accessories. We chose the clamp-on punching bag. Yes, it does work and yes, it is fun! Thanks to our generous Adopt-a-Book donors, we were able to purchase this table and have it customized to fit our needs.

Both tables improve the ergonomics of our work. They also provide flexible space options for when things get really big.

Circulating collections care, Preservation Week, What's In The Lab

Preservation Week: A day in the life, Friday

May 2, 2025 Beth Doyle

Welcome to Day 5 of Preservation Week 2025! To see other posts in this series, follow these links:

Day 1: Curatorial meetings
Day 2: Presenting our HVAC pilot project
Day 3: Using UV light to analyze materials
Day 4: Discovering details in book bindings

To end preservation week we are going on a field trip to pick up materials and process them into our workflows. Our first stop is the library’s shelving unit where the staff have set aside damaged materials for us.

Our next stop is Circulation on the first floor. Front line workers are often the first to see damaged books.

Picking up damaged books from Circulation

When we get back to the lab, we scan items into our library tracking system called Alma. When we scan an item in, it changes the location and availability so that everyone knows where the book is in case it is requested by a patron. We scan items when they come in, and when they leave the lab.

Shipping brings us materials from the East Campus Libraries and from Collections Services. We evaluate each item’s needs and sort them into our workflow by type of repair or housing they need.

Sorting scores and other small items into the pamphlet binding workflow.

Sorting a couple items from Circulation into the book repair workflows.

The best conservation flag this week. This will get an enclosure for sure. We want to keep these items together.

When work is finished, we often have to order shelf labels from Collections Services. When they arrive, we carefully match the barcode on the label with the barcode on the item.

Once everything is labeled, we sort the finished materials by location and send them out.

Sorting material by shelving location. Don’t forget to record your stats!

A week in the life of Conservation is rarely boring. I hope you enjoyed coming along with us on our Preservation Week journey!

Preservation Week, What's In The Lab

Preservation Week 2025: A Day in the Life, Thursday

May 1, 2025 Henry Hebert

During the process of treating items from the collection, we sometimes discover interesting details about their production that can be useful for researchers. Take, for example, this repair that I completed last year on The Byrth of Mankinde, a book printed in London in 1545.

It came into the lab because the front board was detached from the textblock and the leather was split along the spine. We were concerned about further damage occurring to some of those original binding materials with use in this condition, so it was important to reattach the front board and adhere the lifting leather.

The textblock is printed on paper, but on the right side of the image above, you can see the smallest sliver of manuscript on parchment. It was common for binders to use waste material in the construction of bindings. Parchment is a very strong material that can be used to reinforce the board attachment of a book, so it was a common practice to cut up the leaves of parchment manuscripts and paste the fragments into new bindings.

It turns out that all of the adhesive attaching the leather to the boards had completely dried out and failed, so during treatment I was able to just slide it off of the book – kind of like a glove. You can see the major splits through the head of the spine and some sizable losses where the raised bands lace into the boards. At one point the binding had green silk ribbon fore-edge ties protruding from the front and back boards, but they have since broken off and only fragments remained adhered under the pastedowns.

With the leather off of the book, I had more access to view the structure of the binding. The sewing supports are made from tanned leather, which do not remain as flexible as they age. It is not surprising that they have failed. Above you can see the manuscript fragment stub wrapping around the last section of the textblock.

In addition to the failing adhesive, the sewing also broken in the first section, so I was able to release the parchment fragment from the interior of the front board and photograph both sides of it. These photos will be available to researchers when they are ingested into the Conservation Documentation Archive later this year. The text on the manuscript might provide more information about the provenance or production of this book.

I used linen thread to create new sewing supports over the front joint and sewed the first section, with it’s parchment fragment, back onto the textblock. After reattaching the front board and readhering the original leather (with some toned Japanese paper lining the interior of the spine), I decided to leave the parchment fragments loose from the boards at the front and back. Should anyone be interested in reading the text on those fragments, it will be easy to access them if they aren’t hidden under the original pastedowns. I made new pastedowns from handmade paper, so now the original pastedown just becomes the first leaf of the book. This changes the initial experience of reading the book, but from the staining and presence of bookplates, it’s pretty obvious that the now free leaf was once pasted down.

See our other Preservation Week 2025 posts here:

Day 1: Curatorial meetings
Day 2: Presenting our HVAC pilot project
Day 3: Using UV light to analyze materials
Day 4: Discovering details in book bindings
Day 5: Field trip! Gathering damaged books from Circulation points

Environment, Preservation Week

Preservation Week 2025: A Day in the Life, Tuesday

April 29, 2025 Beth Doyle 1 Comment

Welcome to Day 2 of Preservation Week 2025! To see other posts in this series, follow these links:

Last year, in response to the Duke Climate Commitment, we tested an overnight HVAC shutdown pilot project during the winter months in the circulating collections. We wanted to see if the University could reduce its carbon footprint while maintaining adequate environmental conditions our collections. We worked closely with Duke Facilities to determine how to implement this program. You might recall at the beginning of the project we placed an Onset HOBO MX1101 datalogger inside a discarded book to see how it responded to changes in temperature and humidity in the stacks during the HVAC shutdown project.

We noticed some curious readings and decided that the amount of hollowed-out material likely affected the way the text block reacted to changes in humidity and temperature. This winter we created a second test book but this time we used a probe-style Onset HOBO 2302 datalogger. Our working theory was that a smaller hole in the middle of the book would give us better data.

I grabbed a book from the discard pile and started cutting. Once I hollowed out a space for the probe, I created an Ethafoam plug to minimize air filtration at the fore edge.

The books were placed side by side on the shelf with books on either side to ensure they stayed closed. This area of the stacks contain mobile shelving, which are opened and closed regularly as patrons use the aisle.

First test book (left) and the newer book are identified by their bright red wrapper.

I looked at the last 30 days of data from this datalogger in preparation for a talk about this project at the State Energy Conference today. You can see the old book (blue line) vs. the new book (green line) both react slowly to changing conditions. However, you can also clearly see the book with the smaller hole is reacting more slowly to changes in humidity (temperatures remain very stable). Both books are slower to react to ambient rH conditions. But you can definitely see a difference between the two books, which I think is at least partially due to the amount of material excavated from the center of the book.

Tom Young, Critical Systems Controls Engineer in Duke Facilities Management, and I are excited to share our findings with the conference attendees today. Spoiler alert: the energy savings were substantial and the books are fine.

Duke University Libraries Preservation